


Oratory

by thedevilchicken



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Dream Sex, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, Gothic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 08:08:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25600081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: She makes him read to her so she can know it's really him.
Relationships: Vanessa Ives/Sir Malcolm Murray
Comments: 4
Kudos: 22
Collections: Multifandom Horror Exchange (2020)





	Oratory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [disgruntled_owl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/disgruntled_owl/gifts).



> Inspired by episode 1.05 where not!Malcolm recites _Ode to a Nightingale_ by Keats.

"He can't have you, Vanessa," says Sir Malcolm, in the night, in the dark, by the door to her room. 

His tone and his expression are both quite shockingly earnest for a man of his position and his general demeanour, and she would like to believe him. But she would like to believe a great many things, she thinks, and daren't for fear of trickery. She's been to that place before.

When they come to sit with her, to watch her, she asks them to read; Sir Malcolm's library does not encompass an abundance of poetical works but when she asked for it, dry-lipped, voice rasping, she understands a purchase was made on her behalf. It's almost as if the men in the house believe Keats might soothe her soul, or else believe that she believes it. She does not.

Mr. Chandler reads poetry with the earnest tone of a man who understands the meaning of the words but cannot grasp that meaning in his spirit. He reads it like a story, like another man's adventures from which he finds himself at a safe remove, charming but ultimately superficial. Dr. Frankenstein reads rather like a schoolboy in the classroom asked to stand and read aloud. He might falter in his performance, though it's quite like he wrote the words himself. Sembene, in a twist of something almost but not quite irony, reads it like the Bible on a Sunday, solemn as a priest.

When Sir Malcolm reads to her, he sounds like he's reading from the newspaper instead of Keats - that's how she knows it's really him. But in her fevered dreams, when she dares to sleep or else cannot resist, she sees another place, and she is not so sure. 

There is a house in her dreams, like where she grew up but not the same despite a certain loose familiarity. Last night, just like all nights, she woke with a start on a bed that is not hers and went quickly to the window; she can never see beyond the garden, not in the dark of the night with the sharp sliver of moon shrouded in the clouds. Last night, the clouds burst as she watched them and she put her hands to the window glass and felt the sudden downpour beat there. Everything about that place seems real, but not. 

Some nights, she's not alone. She woke to a masquerade once, two nights ago or a week, a month - she doesn't know how long it is she's been sequestered in that room while time runs as elusive as those raindrops on a window pane. She woke in a ruby red dress with her mask tied in place and followed the distant strains of music to the ballroom where he was. She brushed by guests who barely seemed to see her pass to take his hand and dance and dance, but not last night. 

Last night, she threw the window open and she shimmied down the drainpipe in her nightdress, propriety be damned. She ran barefoot through the garden in the freezing rain, past neat hedgerows, past trellises of climbing roses losing petals to the deluge, past tangles of briar that should have been long since pruned away but caught her clothes, caught her skin, made her blood well up just to wash away. She ran, grass and muddy earth against her feet, till her chest heaved and she saw it looming, again, in front of her: the house. What she had believed to be one straight path leading away had brought her back. In that moment, she understood that she was not meant to leave. 

There was a light behind the window and she didn't mean to knock there but she spread her palms against the glass to see if any of the warmth inside might leech out into her; it didn't. She shivered, and a shape moved past the blur of rain on glass, and the window opened. 

"Vanessa," he said, alarmed, and he vaulted past the window frame, out into the rain. He was just in time to catch her as she fell. 

Inside again, the house was not warm. He carried her through the halls where she remembered music playing, into another room where she'd been before, full of books, and maps, and dark-eyed portraiture of people that she wasn't sure had ever lived. The fire in the study seemed cold despite its licking flames whose brightness hurt her eyes and made her turn away toward him. The room was cold, but he was warm, and she pressed her face into his neck and when she shivered, he shivered, too. She felt a flush of guilty pride that she'd done that to him.

When he set her down on the chaise by the fire, he tried to pull away but she caught his wrists. She was cold, so cold, and his skin against hers was all the warmth that she needed. He frowned at her, above her, leaning there with one knee by her hip. He brushed her wet hair back from her face, and from her lips, his fingers hot as if all her heat had rushed out into him and all she had to do was take it back. And so she took it back. 

When she kissed him, surging up to find his mouth with hers, he was not immediately yielding. When her fingers curled into the armholes of his waistcoat, by his collarbones, he did not pull away. His clothes were damp but not soaked like hers were and when he did pull back, when he looked at her, he seemed to notice for the first time how the cloth clung to her skin. It moved with her as she breathed, pulled taut across her breasts with her nipples stiff almost to the point of pain beneath it. It adhered in haphazard folds across her stomach and stuck translucent to her thighs and he frowned as he looked, as his gaze followed it down, and down, to its rucked-up hem. He hesitated as her heart thumped inside her chest and so she took his hands. She took them down to the bare skin by her knees. And slowly, his fingertips caught the cloth and began to drag the nightdress up. 

The window was still wide open as he eased the sodden nightdress higher, but she couldn't feel the wind or the spray of the rain; she felt his hands, steady but uncertain, hot, trailing up against her skin instead. She felt the heat of his breath against her throat as he leaned down to her, as he bared her from her muddy toes up to her waist. He didn't seem to care about mud on the chaise; he cared about his fingertips between her thighs, tracing her slit like the contours of a map of some faraway place he'd spread out on his desk. She thought the way he looked at her was like that, too.

A fumble at his damp clothes, a subtle shift in his position, then he was in her, suddenly, thick and full and hot like a brand. She gasped. She clutched him, clawed his clothed back, wrapped her bare legs around his waist and moved with him when he moved in her. And when he kissed her, she pushed him back. She pushed him down and she straddled him, pulled the nightdress off over her head and rode him just as she'd wanted to, when she'd permitted herself to want it, in spite of all fragments of her better judgement. His bootheels pressed to the floor and he met each roll of her hips as she moved faster, faster. Her heart raced. Her skin flushed with borrowed warmth. And she wished she could know if it was truly him or someone - some _thing_ \- else wearing his face. 

As her climax burst inside her, that was when she woke. Outside the window, rain was falling, but the house was on Grandage Place and not some dark, nameless infinity. And Sir Malcolm is there, with the book of Keats tucked underneath one arm, standing at the door. 

"I was dreaming," she says. 

"Yes," he replies. "I'm afraid I could tell." 

Then they pause like that, the two of them, in that room in his house where they read to her so she can know what's real by it. His eyes are on her, in her thin nightdress that isn't soaked by the rain, awkward, but with a shade she doesn't recognise. In the dark, she almost thinks his cheeks seem flushed.

"He can't have you, Vanessa," he says, with one hand on the doorknob. He's leaving, but she still feels the warmth of him in every part of her. 

"Because I belong to you?" she replies. And if she sounds bitter, she can't help that. 

His mouth twists, wryly, almost as if he knows precisely why she says that, as if he understands the things she dreams, as if he dreams them, too. But he says, "No. Because you are entirely your own."

He opens the door. He leaves through it, and he shuts her in with the thin hope that what he said is true.

She makes him read aloud so she'll know it's him, but she can't remember if he read to her tonight. 

She hopes he did.


End file.
